The study starts by providing a recapitulation of the some of the key historical trends in shipbuilding, highlighting the dominant market share of Asian yards in the industry today, while underlining the strength of the European sector in certain market segments. Furthermore this study analyses the competitiveness of the sector and the present economic crisis and gives a detailed overview of the marine supplies industry in all Member States of the EU covering basic economic and company characteristics, including available products and services. It evaluates the competitive market position of the European marine supplies industry and identifies opportunities for strengthening its sustainable competitiveness.

On the basis of the limited statistical data available in combination with data from associations, extrapolations and interpolations it has been possible to determine the main economic data on the industry as an average over the period 2006 to 2010. The average annual world demand for marine supplies was in the range of 149 billion EUR. The Asian frontrunners China and Korea are by far the biggest national markets, followed by Japan USA, Singapore, Norway, Italy, India, Germany and Brazil.

European marine supplies industry served this global demand with an average production value of 52.5 billion EUR (EU-28) of which about 33% went into export outside of EU-28, and 61.8 billion EUR production value (EU-28 plus Norway and Turkey). The overall production volume represents a market share of the world market in the range of 35% for EU-28, respectively 41.5% for EU-28 plus Norway and Turkey. It is worth to be noted that these market shares take into account production values in Europe and not necessarily production values of European based companies which are generated at overseas production sites.

The five major EU-28 marine supplies production countries, i.e. Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands and France represent about 75% of the total marine supplies production volume. By the same time these countries represent major export countries with more than 67% of the overall EU-28 export production (about 88% by including Denmark and Finland as additional major export countries for marine supplies).

The excecutive summary of study(in English) is available here as download (pdf-file, 1,5 MB).